Climate and health in a changing Africa
Africa’s climate is changing rapidly, reshaping where disease vectors live, how abundant they are, and when they peak. That raises the stakes for vector-borne disease control and for the decisions public-health systems must make. The three hub countries alone the DRC, Nigeria and Tanzania account for 41.8% of global malaria cases and 46.5% of deaths (WHO World Malaria Report, 2024), which is why the network starts here. The project frames the problem around four priorities:
- How is the environment changing for vectors, and how are populations affected?
- How effective are health systems at controlling disease?
- How adaptable are programmes and decision-makers to emerging threats?
- What optimised interventions, early-warning tools and evidence are needed to respond?
Meeting those needs calls for models that are trustworthy, hold up in the real world, and keep pace with change.
Approach
The ERA modelling architecture
MoDD Africa is built around an Effective, Robust and Adaptable (ERA) approach to modelling:
- Effective — methods that produce answers decision-makers can act on.
- Robust — results that hold up under real-world uncertainty and incomplete data.
- Adaptable — models that evolve as conditions, questions and diseases change.
The way of working is collaborative, transparent, sustainable and adaptive: co-designing with National Malaria Programmes and partners from the start, being open about model outputs and their limitations, and strengthening the existing ecosystem rather than working around it.
Work packages
Vectors & environment
Quantifies how climate, urbanisation and land-use reshape where vectors live, their abundance and their seasonality mapping seasonal transmission at national, sub-national and local scales, with model-based adaptive sampling targeting where new field data will help most.
Interventions in urban settings
Blends mathematical, statistical and health-system models to assess how climate change affects malaria control in urban settings including how rural-to-urban migration shifts transmission, and what it means for bednets, access to care, supplies and services.
Early warning
Unifies entomological and epidemiological models into tailored early-warning systems forecasting district-level case trends and flagging threats such as the invasive An. stephensi or spreading resistance, with probabilistic outbreak detection built to plug into existing surveillance.
Skills & networks
Turns the network's diverse skills into lasting impact building capabilities, embedding "systems thinking" into modelling, and growing collaborations beyond the hubs through in-country research, hackathons, modelling competitions and exchanges.
Nov 2024 – Oct 2028
What we will deliver
Over the four years of the project, MoDD Africa aims to:
- Establish modelling hubs in Tanzania, the DRC and Nigeria.
- Develop relevant, model-based advisory systems for malaria control.
- Share knowledge through inter-hub training, hackathons and modelling competitions, and a Community of Practice in vector epidemiology and modelling.
- Form a strong Evidence Synthesis Unit.
While the initial focus is malaria, the approach is designed to extend to other mosquito-borne diseases, such as arboviruses.